News Archive: July 2018

With more people living and working in Wales past the age of 65 years, the contribution that they make to the Welsh economy is growing.

So say health economists from the Centre for Health Economics and Medicines Evaluation (CHEME) at Bangor University in their report Living well for longer: The economic argument for investing in the health and wellbeing of older people in Wales launched today (30 July 2018).

Bangor University has again been ranked in the top 10 of the UK’s non-specialist Universities, according to the latest annual National Student Survey (NSS).

The news follows the University’s inclusion among the top 100 European Universities in the recent Times Higher Education (THE) European Teaching Rankings, the first university league table to focus solely on teaching and learning.

A three-year programme designed to provide tailored work experience for fulltime students under the age of 25 has been extended.

GO Wales: Achieve through Work Experience provides tailored support to eligible younger students from more disadvantaged backgrounds to get the best out of their work experience and plan their next steps.

Bangor University appears among the top 100 European Universities in the latest university ‘league table’ to be published.

The Times Higher Education (THE) University Teaching Ranking is the first university league table to focus solely on teaching and learning and is based on the THE’s first European Student Survey and on other available data.

The table ranks universities according to ‘teaching prowess’ and, with Bangor University the only Welsh University to be Awarded Gold in the first round of Teaching Excellence Framework, it’s no surprise that the University is among the leading universities providing the best learning environment for students.

Every year Bangor University’s Alumni Advisory Board considers candidates and advises the University on an Alumnus of the Year award. Bangor University was proud to present Gwilym Rees-Jones with 2018’s Alumnus of the Year award during graduation week.

Two Bangor University students have been presented with Drapers’ Medals. The Drapers’ Company is one of the historic Livery Companies of the City of London, and now a philanthropic organization. The Drapers’ Company kindly donates two medals each year to be awarded to outstanding postgraduate students. These prestigious awards takes into account the quality of a student’s research, teaching, and service to the University and community.

The Beverton Medal the FSBI’s most senior award and highest honour and marks Prof Carvalho as a distinguished scientist. He received the Medal and gave an acceptance speech at the recent FSBI Symposium.

It is 15 years since Transport for London (TfL) launched the Oyster card on London’s buses and tube trains, but Oyster hasn’t had a very happy birthday.

Instead of cake, candles and raised glasses, news broke that money trapped on dormant Oyster cards amounts to £321m, a princely sum that has effectively been loaned, interest-free from the public to TfL. This “mountain of cash” exists as credit on cards that haven’t been used for at least a year – either lost, damaged, abandoned, or stashed away.

Professor Nathan Abrams, a Kubrick expert at Bangor University, has discovered a 1956 screenplay by Stanley Kubrick which was believed to have been lost. Titled Burning Secret, it was an adaptation of Viennese novelist, Stefan Zweig's 1913 novella of the same name.

The novella is told from the perspective of a twelve-year old Jewish boy. He is befriended by a suave but predatory baron at an Austrian holiday spa resort as a means of seducing his married mother. The child acts as an unwitting go-between for his mother and her would-be lover making for a disturbing story with sexuality and child abuse churning beneath its surface.

In the middle of the last century, mass-produced, disposable plastic waste started washing up on shorelines, and to be found in the middle of the oceans. This has since become an increasingly serious problem, spreading globally to even the most remote places on Earth. Just a few decades later, in the 1970s, scientists found the same problem was occurring at a much less visible, microscopic level, with microplastics.

When England hosted the 1996 European Championships, a song by Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds inspired the popular chant: “football’s coming home”. Ahead of England’s World Cup semi-final defeat by Croatia, many fans were again talking about football coming home. But were they right to do so? After all, there is a chance that football will still be coming home – despite England’s elimination.

As the first stage has been achieved in a new European research collaboration to combat two of the most aggressive brain cancers (www.sumcastec.eu), academic and industry participants are meeting at Bangor University this week (11-12 July) to discuss the next steps.

The Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis conducted by Bangor University’s Centre for Health Economics & Medicines Evaluation (CHEME) placed monetary values on all aspects of the benefits deriving from Codi’r To activities with pupils in the two schools and found that every £1 spent generates a social value return of £6.69.

It lasted for 48 hours. Two days after Theresa May told Conservative ministers that they must adhere to the convention of collective responsibility and support the agreed Brexit plan, the prime minister had to accept the resignation of her Brexit secretary, David Davis, and foreign secretary, Boris Johnson.

In his resignation letter, Davis wrote that he did not support the new agreed strategy and was following the collective responsibility convention in resigning.

Collective responsibility only concerns ministers in government serving within the cabinet. Dating back to the 18th century, it is a constitutional convention which holds that members of the cabinet should support all governmental decisions. While it’s a convention rather than a legal requirement, ministers are nonetheless expected to show a “united front” for all government actions and policies.

Three thousand rare letters surviving from the 17th and 18th centuries are to be made available to the international scholarly community following a new research award from the Marc Fitch Fund.

Bangor University’s Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates has been awarded the £40,000 grant to digitise and research an exceptional collection of letters kept in the library of Mostyn Hall in Flintshire.

Global conservation targets should not be met at the cost of the world’s poor. The first study to evaluate a policy aiming to compensate local people for the costs of conservation has revealed that, despite good intentions, the poor have lost out.

Tropical forests are important to all of us on the planet. As well as being home for rare and fascinating biodiversity (like the lemurs of Madagascar), tropical forests lock up enormous amounts of carbon helping to stabilise our climate. However tropical forests are also home to many hundreds of thousands of people whose lives can be affected by international conservation policies.

Multilateral donors such as the World Bank have made clear commitments that those negatively impacted by their projects should be compensated. This includes those affected by conservation projects such as those intended to slow climate change by preventing tropical deforestation (a scheme known as REDD+ or Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Researchers have, for the first time, studied one such compensation scheme in depth and revealed it to be inadequate.

Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences is leading one of 12 major research projects to have successfully bid to carry out crucial research in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet- the Arctic.

The joint-funding for the work comes to the University from the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the Changing Arctic Ocean project.

Dr Yueng-Djern Lenn, a Senior Lecturer in Physical Oceanography at the School of Ocean Sciences is to lead the new three-year research project with partners and collaborating institutions. The aim is to increase understanding of how changes within our oceans might affect the quantity of phytoplankton produced in the Arctic Ocean.

For the first time, the UK and Germany have joined forces to investigate the impact of climate change on the Arctic Ocean.

The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) have jointly invested almost £8 million in 12 new projects to carry out crucial research in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet. The new projects start today and join the existing NERC Changing Arctic Ocean research programme, which aims to better understand – and predict – changes to the Arctic marine environment and ecosystems.